A Week with the iPad

For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.

Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially work depending on what I’m trying to do.

I’m really enjoying it now that I’ve gotten a comfort level with navigating around and multitasking features. I find that the “one app at a time” nature of iOS helps me stay on track and focus on deeper tasks — things like writing documents, planning, and of course being able to sketch and diagram using the Pencil, which I do a ton of. I’ve liked Notability so far of the drawing apps I’ve tested for what I need.

One of the biggest things I had to figure out a solution for was being able to write and publish to this website efficiently. Since I use Jekyll and GitHub Pages under the hood, I hadn’t found a simple solution to manage the git repository and preview posts. I’ll go deeper on that workflow in a future post, because it’s a pretty comfortable setup (for me) that others might find useful.

Overall I’m liking working on iPad more and more. It gets easier as I accrue knowledge of tips, tricks, and other workflows.